Obama: Court push not about politics

To hear President Barack Obama tell it, the motives underlying his latest partisan fight have nothing to do with politics.

But there’s no question that the ideology of the courts, and of one particularly powerful court, are at the heart of the dispute.

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The president used the huge megaphone of a Rose Garden event Tuesday to press the Senate — specifically, Senate Republicans — to confirm three new judicial nominees. But when it came to their judicial philosophy, or even their view on the proper role of the courts, he fell mute.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats have called for confirming additional judges to the D.C. Circuit in order to counter a Republican contingent on the court that has been “wreaking havoc” with rulings upending environmental regulations, anti-tobacco measures and presidential recess appointment powers that have been assumed for a couple of centuries.

“There is a crisis and we need to do something about it,” Reid said last month.

But Obama didn’t speak at all Tuesday about the court’s ideological outlook, or even about a search for balance. Instead, he highlighted the court’s workload and spoke of the president’s constitutional prerogative to name judges.

And he denounced Republicans for playing politics with their complaints that the nominations represented a political power grab. “I didn’t just wake up one day and say, ‘Let’s add three seats to the [D.C. Circuit] court of appeals,’” he said. “What I am doing today is my job. I need the Senate to do its job.”

Despite the president’s complaints about politics infecting the confirmation process, it’s beyond debate that his liberal supporters are eager to see more of his judges on the bench. Liberal activists are confident the addition of Obama appointees to the mix would temper the rulings of a court that, say some on the left, has been on a kind of conservative ideological crusade.

However, when asked Tuesday if concern about the direction of the influential court played into Obama’s decision to offer up a slate of three D.C. Circuit nominees, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted that the driving factor was the largely logistical matter of making sure the court was firing on all cylinders.

“The president believes that this court, which is commonly referred to as the second highest court in the land, should be fully staffed,” Carney said.

But Republicans continued to paint the move as a partisan power grab. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that there’s a cloud hanging over the appointments, which he described as a “culture of intimidation” represented by the threat of a rules change to the Senate that would allow the Democrats to impose the “nuclear option” of allowing votes to pass by simple majority.

Reid, who praised the president’s picks as “really good” choices and said he wants to move quickly to get them confirmed to fill out the vacancies at the court, responded that if the minority party blocked any of the three judicial nominees, he would confront that challenge “when we get there” — though he declined to engage McConnell over the nuclear option.

With Republicans leveling charges that Obama is trying to “pack” the court with his judges, the president seemed to take pains Tuesday to stress his nominees’ qualifications and to downplay signs of their ideology.

Obama insisted that his latest nominees, Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard, and Robert Wilkins, are “highly qualified” and “incredibly accomplished lawyers.” He even drew some laughs when he exclaimed: “These are no hacks. These are no slouches.”

But in presenting his Supreme Court nominees, Obama hasn’t shied away from indicating that legal and intellectual skill was not, in his view, enough. In introducing Sonia Sotomayor, he spoke of the need for “experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune….experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”

In putting forward Elena Kagan, Obama lauded her “understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people.” He also saluted “her commitment to protect our fundamental rights, because in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”